Assassination of Courageous Doctor in Wichita:War on Abortion Rights Escalates

Truck targeting Dr. George Tiller parked outside his Wichita clinic, two days after his assassination. (Photo: Steve Hebert/Atlas Press for The New York Times)

Mobilize to Defend the Clinics!Abolish All Restrictions – For Free Abortion on Demand!

The vile murder of the courageous abortion doctor
George Tiller at his church in Wichita, Kansas was not the deranged act of a
lone gunman. This heinous crime marks an escalation of the war on women’s right
to abortion in this country. The constitutional protection hangs by a thread –
a single vote in the Supreme Court. The “god squads” are in a frenzy, harassing
women patients and abortion providers at the clinics. The reaction of the bourgeois
feminists has been to look to the Democratic Party and the government of Barack
Obama in the White House. Yet the Democrats are not allies but enemies of women’s rights.Obama opposes the late-term abortions that Dr. Tiller provided while
seeking “common ground” with the Bible-thumping bigots who harbor the abortion
doctor killers. And the police, from local cops to the FBI, give a free pass to
the assassins, whom they know well.

Dr. George Tiller, who provided medical services to
women in need of abortion for 35 years, was hounded by the reactionary bigots
for decades. In 1986 his clinic was bombed, in 1993 he was shot in both arms by
a fanatical opponent of abortion. That year Operation Rescue, the largest
organizer of anti-abortion mobs, moved its national headquarters to Wichita to
target Tiller; more than 2,000 people were arrested as they besieged his clinic
that summer. They then started stalking clinic employees. Tiller also faced an
endless barrage of state legal actions, grand jury probes, regulatory and
professional misconduct complaints, as opponents used any ploy to put his
clinic out of business. After years of “investigation,” the Kansas attorney
general charged him with improper actions in 19 cases of late-term abortions; this
past March, a jury took barely 45 minutes of deliberation to find him innocent
on all of these trumped-up counts.

The assassin, Scott Roeder, was no stranger to the
anti-abortion protests, or to the police. A 2007 posting by a Scott Roeder on
the Operation Rescue web site stated: “Tiller is the concentration camp
‘Mengele’ of our day and needs to be stopped...” (Washington Post, 2 June). The local office of the FBI was well
aware of Roeder’s activities, having warned him in 2000 about gluing shut the
doors of a Kansas City clinic, a federal crime. On May 23, he was seen on a
security camera gluing the doors at the same clinic, and he was chased away by
a clinic worker on May 29, the day before the murder. The FBI was informed
about both instances but said it could do nothing until a federal grand jury
was convened. Police around the country proclaim “zero tolerance” of petty
crimes, arresting people on the slightest violation, yet here they did nothing
about blatant violations of federal law as the “perp” went from “vandalism” to
murder.

No less important in setting the climate in which
religious nuts and right-wing “right-to-lifers” spawn assassination are the
bourgeois politicians. For the eight years of the George Bush regime,
evangelical Christians and other abortion opponents concentrated on
manipulating the Republican Party and the levers of state power. With the
changing of the guard in Washington and the dominance of the Democrats, some of
the reactionary fringe have grown frantic. From Texas to Notre Dame they have
been showing up at presidential events with their grotesque depictions of
fetuses and signs proclaiming Obama a “baby killer,” “Anti-Christ” and “terrorist.”
The White House response has been feel-good talk about “civility” and finding
“common ground”.” This conciliation only emboldens bloodthirsty anti-abortionists,
from right-wing instigators like Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly to “pro-life” killers
who pull the trigger.

In his Notre Dame University commencement address,
Obama repeated over and over the mantra about seeking “common ground” with
these antediluvian reactionaries who want to turn women into incubators, deny
them medical services and persecute those who provide this care. Obama’s rhetoric
is not empty. He called to “work together to reduce the number of women seeking
abortion” and to “draft a sensible conscience clause,” to absolve doctors for
violating the Hippocratic Oath by refusing to perform abortions. Obama has said
that he is personally opposed to abortion, and last July, he told the
“progressive Christian” magazine Relevant
that as long as there is a narrow medical exception for the woman’s health,
“I think we can prohibit late-term abortions.” He is offering up the
fundamental democratic right of woman to control their own bodies on the altar
of his quest for a political bloc with religious reaction. To hell with that –
there can be no common ground with these bigots, they must be defeated!

Obama took over this repulsive appeal from Hillary
Clinton, who in 2005 prepared her bid for the Democratic presidential
nomination by declaring, in a speech on the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s
1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing
abortion, that she was looking for “common ground” with abortion opponents on
the basis that the “tragic choice” of abortion “does not ever have to be
exercised or only in very rare circumstances.” This, in turn, was a
continuation of Bill Clinton’s 1992 and ’96 presidential campaign slogan that
abortion should be safe, legal and rare.” For more than a decade and a half,
these capitalist politicians have been trying to unite with the ultra-right, or
at least take the wind out of their sales, by cynically sacrificing women.
Although bourgeois feminists fervently campaigned for them, the Clintons, Obama and the Democratic Party
as a whole have joined in the attack on women’s rights.

All the talk about abortion as a “tragic choice” or as
Obama put it, a “heart-wrenching decision,” are nothing but religious claptrap
and attempts to make women feel guilty about trying to control their own lives
by ending an unwanted pregnancy. What is tragic is forcing women to give birth
against their will, and condemning more than 100,000 desperate women to death
every year due to the consequences of botched abortions, often self-induced
because they can’t find a doctor to do it.Abortion is a simple medical procedure and potentially one of the
safest. A fetus is not an “unborn child,” it is a part of a woman’s body until
birth. This is as true in the third trimester as earlier. There is no such
thing as a “partial-birth abortion” – this is a propaganda term by those who
want to label abortion infanticide(“baby killing”). A fetus has no rights, the woman does – or should
have. And the fight to defend those rights must be waged against all the capitalist parties and
politicians, who in one way or another, to one degree or another, chain women
to the family.

Dr. George Tiller was murdered because he defended the
rights of women and stood by those who decided they had to end pregnancy in the
face of all the abuse heaped on them and the death threats against him. His
motto was “Trust Women.” So did Dr. David Gunn, shot to death outside his
Pensacola, Florida abortion clinic in 1993, as was Dr. John Britton at another
Pensacola clinic the next year; Shannon Lowney and Leanne Nichols, clinic
workers gunned down in Brookline, Massachusetts in 1994; and Buffalo abortion
doctor Barnett Slepian, killed in his kitchen in 1998. The politicians did not
rush to defend the doctors whose names and addresses were published on
hit-lists on the Internet, to be crossed off when they were murdered. None were
in evidence at Dr. Tiller’s funeral. Instead, the Democrats want to find
“common ground” with a “movement” led by fascistic elements like Randall Terry,
who orchestrated the ’90s Wichita protests and the recent protests against
Obama at Notre Dame.

Terry started out working for Guatemalan president
Efraín Ríos Montt, the godfather of the death squads in that country. While
various anti-abortion leaders issued hypocritical statements distancing
themselves from the killing of George Tiller, Terry called the courageous
doctor a “mass murderer” who deserved “execution.” It was striking, then, that
various “mainstream” women’s organizations that issued statements lamenting Dr.
Tiller’s death echoed the same conciliatory theme as Obama. For years, these
groups have desperately sought respectability by avoiding a forthright defense
of abortion. NARAL Pro-Choice America, which changed its name to eliminate the “A-word,”
issued a “call on opponents of a woman’s right to choose to condemn this action
completely and absolutely.” Planned Parenthood quoted Obama’s words, “imploring”
the anti-abortion forces to drop the “hateful rhetoric”; it couldn’t even bring
itself to mention abortion at all.

The bourgeois feminists’ calls for the “full weight of
the law” to be brought to bear against anti-abortion violence show deadly
illusions in the capitalist state. The FBI has known of Tiller’s assassin,
Roeder, for years, and at most gave him a “heads up” tip not to get caught
violating the clinic access law. Likewise they had been keeping tabs on Paul
Hill, who shot Dr. Britton in Pensacola. Dr. Slepian in Buffalo had been
targeted by Operation Rescue, and among the 1993 besiegers outside his home was
James Kopp, shown on tape making death threats against the doctor, whom he slew
a year later. The blind faith of the “pro-choice” organizers in the police
brings to mind the calls in the early 1960s on President John Kennedy to send
the FBI to protect civil rights marchers. The feds did intervene, but they were
so deeply tied to the KKK lynchers that their informants took part in church
bombings. No matter who sits in the White House, it’s a given that the forces
of bourgeois repression will be on the side of bourgeois reaction.

As we have stated:

“The Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth
International stand for abortion that is legal, safe, free, and on demand. That
is, if a woman, of whatever age, wants an abortion to prevent an unwanted
pregnancy, then she has the right to have it. No politician, priest or police,
or husband or boyfriend or parent or anyone else, should be able to force her
to give birth. Period, end of story. Rather than looking to the state to
protect abortion providers and their patients, we call for class-struggle
defense of the clinics against the anti-abortion ‘god squad’ thugs. We put forward
this program in the United States, in Mexico, Brazil, Algeria and throughout
the world as part of our program for women’s liberation through socialist
revolution.”

Obama seeks to conciliate the anti-abortion crusaders
in the name of “overcoming” the “culture wars” that have rent the U.S. for
decades. “Culture wars are so ’90s,” he said in a 2007 speech to Planned
Parenthood. And ’80s, and ’70s, and ’60s, he might have added. Again, behind
the political posture are concrete acts. Obama the candidate told PP “the first
thing I’d do as president” would be to sign the Freedom of Choice Act, which in
effect codifies Roe v. Wade. Yet Obama
the president says the bill is “not my highest legislative priority” (New York Times, 15 May). The “culture
wars” are not some ethereal dispute between conservatives and liberals over
“values.” What they is really about is the reactionary drive to undo the
limited gains of the civil rights movement, of women’s rights, of gay rights
and democratic rights in general in order to return to the regimented social
reaction of the Cold War.

These rights were won because of tumultuous social
struggles, linked to the fact that the U.S. was losing an imperialist war. The
tenuous and limited right to abortion embodied in the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court
Roe v. Wade decision was partly in response to a growing women’s movement, but
more fundamentally due to a general awareness of the ruling class that it could
not simply clamp down on social unrest. In the same period, the death penalty
was temporarily set aside. On the other hand, the rollback of women’s rights
has gone hand in hand with attacks on blacks’ rights to vote; with mass
round-ups of tens of thousands of immigrants thrown into concentration camps
and deported even though they committed no crime; with attacks on the unions
and workers’ rights; and with imperialist war that has killed hundreds of
thousands of Iraqis and Afghans, while police state repressive measures like
the PATRIOT U.S.A. law.

Thus the fight to defend abortion rights must be part
of a broad struggle to defend the exploited and oppressed against the
“bipartisan” war being waged against them and their rights by both major
capitalist parties. Today, the constitutional protection of abortion rights
could be reversed with a single vote on the Supreme Court. Anti-abortion
conservatives assume and “pro-choice” liberals fervently hope that Obama’s
nominee, JudgeSonia Sotomayor will be a
consistent supporter of Roe v. Wade.
But there is no evidence of that, and if she reflects Obama’s policy that would
lead to decisions severely restricting the threatened right to abortion. Even
today, when it is still legal, the Guttmacher Institute reports that no
abortion services are available in 87 percent of U.S. counties.

We had wanted to present a map showing this, but
cannot because many medical facilities who provide abortion fear that if this
becomes known, they will be subjected to the same persecution as Dr. Tiller.
Even the information that abortion is available in a particular county could
lead these vigilantes to locate the facilities and track down the personnel. In
short: abortion in much of the United States today is semi-clandestine. And now for women seeking third-trimester
abortions, it has become almost unavailable. Less than one percent of all
abortions are performed after 21 weeks, and these cases are almost always
connected with deep problems: severe deformities of the fetus, very young teenagers
who discover late that they are pregnant, etc. Dr. Tiller was one of only three
doctors in the entire U.S. who publicly provided late-term abortions. One of
the remaining two, Dr. Warren Hern of Boulder, Colorado has been the subject of
death threats for years. He remarked on Dr. Tiller’s death:

“This is the result of 35 years of relentless and
merciless anti-abortion harassment, violence and intimidation, hate speech and
violent rhetoric, and this is the absolutely predictable consequence of that....
Clearly, the anti-abortion people will stop at nothing, including
assassination, to impose their will on other people.... Dr. Tiller’s ‘crime’
was that he helped women.... We don’t have to invade other countries to find
the terrorists. They’re here killing doctors who do abortions.”

Opponents of abortion got what they wanted with the
assassination of George Tiller. He is dead, his clinic has been permanently
closed, women who require the services he provided have almost nowhere to turn.
Wherever possible, defenders of abortion should mobilize to defend clinics
under siege. To defeat the forces of reaction that would deny women the
fundamental right to control their own bodies requires a fight against all
forms of social oppression and the system of exploitation that gives rise to
them. Not Democrats or Republicans but a revolutionary workers party will fight
to defend women’s rights, as in the early Soviet republic, led by Lenin and
Trotsky, where for the first time in history the right to abortion was made
real. ■